Program Impact Assessment in Eastern Congo

This project seeks to develop new instruments for the direct measurement of local violence in the context of rigorous program evaluation. Many post conflict interventions seek to reduce the level of poverty, the incidence of conflict or both. The level of poverty and the incidence of violence are crucially intertwined, a feature which makes identifying casual linkages especially challenging. Assessing the impact of interventions on the incidence of violence and the relationship between development and peace, however, is difficult, with assessment often relying on survey data or on evidence from scattered official reports. Our goal is to develop measures that will be recorded in real time at a scale that will allow the data to complement the evaluation of local level development interventions. These measure are to be developed and tested in the context of unique large scale randomized evaluation of a community driven reconstruction project involving 250 communities in post conflict eastern Democratic Republic of Congo which aims to promote poverty reduction and mitigate conflict.